New Clothes
by Andi Horton
Summary: Jill would much rather die fighting for Narnia than grow old and go about in a bath chair. On the afternoon of the fancy dress ball, we learn why.


New Clothes

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"I was going to say I wished we'd never come. But I don't, I don't, I don't. Even if we are killed. I'd rather be killed fighting for Narnia than grow old and stupid at home and perhaps go about in a bath-chair and then die in the end just the same."

~ _The Last Battle_

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Jill stood before her mirror and told herself not to be such an idiot.

"It would be stupid," she said sternly, "to have spent all that time cramming them under all the socks in your trunk if you weren't going to wear them at _least_ once."

The girl in the mirror looked back at her, face impassive and somehow much nobler than Jill thought her own face had any right to look. But then, it wasn't her fault, really, was it? It was the clothes that did that— the sumptuous, otherworldly garments that clung to her frame and fit her more rightly than any other clothes she had ever worn in her life, and made a little girl look a lady.

Really, it would have been hard _not_ to look a lady in that dress. The silk was softer than finest cotton, and the embroidery richer and brighter than anything Jill had seen in this world. The clothes were so fine and grand that they made the girl's bedroom look dull and grey simply by being worn in it.

Jill was nervous of wearing them.

They had looked well and right in the world they had come from, of course, and they had shone with an otherworldly brilliance in the dull, damp autumn at Experiment House, but that was there, and that had been then. Here, in this world, in her bedroom just before Christmas, Jill stared at the strange person in her mirror and she just _knew_ that everybody at the ball would know at first glance that she, in this world, had no right to own such clothes. In this world, Jill knew, she was nobody special at all, and this dress looked far too special for her.

"Jill!" Mummy knocked at the door. "Jill, are you not ready yet?"

"Almost," Jill said, and then thought that had probably been a lie, either because she was _entirely_ ready, rather than almost, or else because she was not ready at all but rather was about to strip off the beautiful dress and surcote, stuff them back under her bed (where they had been carefully concealed since she had arrived home last week) and hastily change into the Alice costume Mummy had laid out for her.

"Well hurry, dear, please," Mummy said, and though she didn't sound cross, she did sound like somebody who was looking at her watch. "We're nearly late, and I think it would be nice of you to show Gran your costume before we go."

Jill wavered one terrible moment longer, staring at the lady in the mirror, wracked with self-doubt and indecision. But then Mummy knocked again, and warned Jill she was going to wait downstairs, and Jill decided that getting herself out of these clothes and into other ones was really more trouble than it was worth. So she gathered up the skirts of her beautiful outfit and, feeling strangely shy in her own home, she sidled out the door into the corridor beyond.

Mummy had gone down to the entryway already, so Jill was left alone, a small, gently-glittering figure in the dim upstairs passage. She would go downstairs to join her parents in just a minute, but first . . . she turned and walked down the hall, to the back of the house. She knocked once on the door at the very end of the corridor, and waited.

"Yes?" The permission in the query was implicit, so Jill lifted the latch and walked into the bedroom beyond.

This was Gran's bedroom. It was also her sitting room, and her dining room too. It was the biggest bedroom in the whole house, and though Gran was Mummy's mother, it had been Daddy's choice to give her this room when Gran had come to live with them, and had brought some things she couldn't bear to leave behind or sell.

There had been no room there for Gran's piano, so they had squeezed that into the tiny parlour downstairs, but here there was room for almost everything else. The bedroom held Gran's big, old bed and her bookshelves and the giant aspidistra (which Jill thought was hideous) and there was also Gran's bath-chair, which sat by the window Gran looked through all day, every day, watching the world pass by below.

"Gran?" Jill felt even smaller and shyer in this room than she had in her own. She plucked at her skirt a little, and Gran looked away from the window with bright-eyed curiosity.

"Why, Jane," she said thoughtfully, "what a unique thing you are wearing."

Jill bit her lip. "No, Gran," she said, and shut the door behind her, "not Jane, it's Jill. Mum's— Jane's daughter. You remember." Sometimes saying it was enough to make it so. This was one of those times. Gran blinked thoughtfully, and then her face cleared a little.

"Of course it's Jill," she smiled. "I should know you anywhere! You've gotten very big . . . but my, what a pretty gown! Is it a special occasion?"

"Sort of," said Jill, who didn't exactly consider Aunt Muriel's Christmas fancy-dress ball a special occasion. "It's for Aunt Muriel's party, Gran. Mummy's going as the Red Queen, you know, and Daddy is going Under Protest, and I'm . . . I'm this. Do— d'you like it?"

"Oh, yes. You look very handsome, dear," Gran nodded indulgently, and the soft, sweet wrinkles that lined her face deepened and parted to make room for a gentle smile. "Very handsome."

Jill smiled and took three quick, impulsive steps forward. "I couldn't think of where else to wear it," she confessed. "I've had it since autumn. I wanted to put it on at school, actually, and a few times I almost did, but— but somebody would have seen. They watch us, there. I didn't dare."

Gran nodded again, her eyes fastened on Jill's face with the sort of bright, polite curiosity that was becoming characteristic of her. Jill could now only vaguely remember a day when Gran _hadn't_ worn that expression, that look of one who is ever on the verge of drifting back and forth between this world and another.

"So I brought them home . . ." Jill took another step forward, then another. She was almost at Gran's chair. "The dress, and the over-part thing, and the slippers and the— the bits that go on underneath, I brought them all, but it was tricky. I had to pack them down awfully small in my trunk."

"Yes," Gran nodded, "yes, you would have to." She looked at the rich, royal blue fabric of the surcote, and her expression as she studied it was almost wistful. "So very pretty, dear," she smiled. "Wherever did you find something so nice?" This question was put to Jill with the bright curiosity of a small child, rather than the polite enquiry of an old woman. And Jill's answer to her was, as are the answers we often give to children, stripped down to the most naked simplicity one could imagine.

"Aslan gave them to me, Gran." She sank into a puddle of soft, rich cloth at the foot of Gran's chair. "He breathed on us, and he gave us new things to wear, and then Scrubb and I — that's a boy from my school, you know, Eustace Scrubb, I may have mentioned him — and Scrubb's — Scrubb's friend, we all came back to my school and we . . ." but here she stopped, and bit her lip, and placed a hand in her Gran's lap and looked up into the kindly enquiring face of the much older woman. "Gran, will you remember any of this tomorrow?"

"Mmm?" Gran said, and reached down to pat her granddaughter's little hand. "Why, certainly, dear, I shall see you tomorrow!"

Jill nodded, her question answered. She looked down at her hand, which was small and pink and a little scraped from where she had knocked it against the tap of the wash basin. It was, she thought, a very young hand, and looked especially young when it was held in the very old hand of her Gran. She swallowed hard.

"I wish you could have been there, Gran," she said softly. "I wish you could have seen it all. I think . . . somehow I think that even _you_ wouldn't have been able to forget all of that, if you had been there to see it."

"Mmm?" Gran said, bright and enquiring as always. "What's that, then, dear?"

Jill looked at their hands a moment longer, and then lifted her gaze to her grandmother's face.

"He's so MUCH, Gran. He's so very Much that I think once he got into your head, even _you_ would never be able to forget him. I wish . . . I wish . . ." But the wish was too dear, too grand to be said. It hung, unspoken, between them, and Gran looked at Jill with the sweet tranquility particular to those who have forgotten everything that might ever have troubled them.

"You have a very pretty dress, dear," she said kindly, and Jill nodded.

"Yes, Gran," she said. "Thank you. I'm glad you like it." She got to her feet, then, and wobbled a little, because the floor was hard and her knees smarted from having been pressed against it.

"I thought," said Gran, and here she was trying to work something out, the vague confusion on her face only slightly less painful for Jill to witness than tranquil acceptance, "that you were going to be Alice tonight."

"I was," Jill nodded. "And I have been, lots of years before. Because Mummy's the Red Queen, and . . . but that doesn't matter. I was Alice, before. But not this time. This time I'm . . . something else."

"Something else." Gran looked at Jill thoughtfully. "Something new."

Jill nodded. "Yes, Gran," she bent and squeezed Gran's hands in her own, "that's exactly what I am. I'm something new."

Gran's eyes shone.

"Because of the Lion," she deduced, and Jill beamed.

"Yes," she breathed, and flung her arms impulsively around the old woman, "yes, Gran, that's exactly it. Because of the Lion. Now—"

"Jill!" the summons was muffled by the door, but not by much; Mummy had a very carrying voice.

"Coming, Mummy!" Jill called over her shoulder, then looked back to Gran. "I have to go, now, because they're waiting and I've made us late again, I think; I just wanted you to see my costume first."

"That was very sweet of you, dear," Gran nodded. "Very sweet. You enjoy that party, now, won't you? Such a pretty dress . . ."

Jill nodded, smiling, and started for the door at a clumsy run, but stopped all at once and turned. The door was open, she was about to step through, but something was poking at her, stopping her.

"Wait, Gran," she said, half-turning, "I never told you he was a—"

"_Jill!_"

"Yes, Mummy, coming, Mummy, I just—" but she looked back and saw Gran was gone again, sitting back in her bath-chair, staring out the window at the grey afternoon sky, at something nobody else could see. So Jill bit her lip, murmured her softest good bye, and closed the door behind her.

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**A.N.:** This is the second of what will be seven fics written to prompts given me by my friend Katie. I am not really sure yet how the other stories will pan out, but if any more of them keep me from sleeping at night, then I suppose we will see soon enough! Especially if certain people keep encouraging me in my bad habits . . . (_cough_-_cough_-Louise!-_cough_-_cough_)

Now, the whole thing about the clothes Jill wore— I had to go over the book very carefully and from what I can tell, although Rillian changed out of his black things, Jill and Eustace didn't ever actually change out of the clothes they took from the Giants, which (we are told) didn't fit them perfectly. So it seems most logical to assume that the clothes they were wearing when they left Narnia were those not-quite-fitting things they took from the Giants . . . but I didn't like that idea. I much prefer the description of the clothes Jill first put on when they got to Narnia, because THEY sound like the sort of things you would want to smuggle home and find an excuse to wear. So when writing this I chose to believe that when Aslan breathed on them he dressed them both in things that fit them well and so they looked all the more impressive for it, because let's face it, people just don't look that well in clothes that don't fit them properly. So I took that liberty.

I also took the liberty of making reference to a couple of Lewis Carroll's characters, and of course I made free use of CS Lewis's wonderful Narnia and the incomparable Jill Pole, who is (I freely admit) not much at all like me, but who somehow seemed to me, when I was ten years old, everything I would have liked to have had the nerve to be.


End file.
